


the earth welcomes you

by mercuryhatter



Series: the earth welcomes you [1]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childbirth, Domestic, Hand Jobs, Kid Fic, M/M, Oral Sex, Trans Male Character, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-08 13:43:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17387423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: An Aziraphale-and-Crowley-get-turned-human AU shamelessly set to San Bernardino by The Mountain Goats.





	1. the day was bright and fine

When they got home after the apocalypse-that-couldn’t, the gravity between them splintered and they collapsed into each other like stars. It was cosmic and base at once. It was fated and yet defiant. It was sweet, and soft, and above all it was loving. 

 

“We’re going to catch-- uh, something. For this,” Crowley whispered when it was over, curled in the shell of Aziraphale’s body. Aziraphale pressed his face to the back of Crowley’s neck and said nothing. At any other time his silence would have tipped Crowley into a spiral of doubt, but at the moment they were still so enmeshed together that he knew it for what it was, and was silent in return. 

 

They slept. They did the Ritz. A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. And then the Metatron and Beelzebub showed up in Aziraphale’s back room, interrupting a drunken discussion about whether monkeys laid eggs. Crowley and Aziraphale sobered up so quickly that the  _ pop _ of the alcohol vacating their bloodstreams would have been audible to human ears, had any been present. 

 

“We aren’t angry,” the Metatron began. 

 

“Juzzzt diszappointed,” finished Beelzebub. Aziraphale heard Crowley swallow nervously next to him and firmly took his hand. 

 

“About what, precisely?” It was easier to defy your superiors the second time around, Aziraphale was finding. Crowley, every muscle locked up tense, was finding quite the opposite. 

 

“Playing the fool works far better on Gabriel than it does on us, Aziraphale,” the Metatron said severely. “You must know your relationship with this…” it waved a half-materialized hand vaguely at Crowley, who violently suppressed a flinch, “would not stand.” 

 

“Azzz for you, Crowzley, this is juzzt  _ embarrazzzing _ ,” Beelzebub said witheringly. Crowley gave a weak sort of half-shrug, as if to say  _ you’re not wrong _ while drawing as little attention to his own existence as possible. 

 

“Quite,” the Metatron agreed. “You must both cease your associations at once.”

 

“Or there will be  _ conzzequencezz. _ ” 

 

Aziraphale actually laughed. He couldn’t help it. Twice in as many days the– well, not the highest powers of Heaven and Hell, but definitely the highest of the middle management– stood before him and told him what he was meant to do and want and be. Under normal circumstances Aziraphale had had to deal with remarkably little being told what to do over the millennia for an angel. His bosses had sort of given up on that after the whole sword thing. The last specific instruction he’d received before 1990 was “ _ get back down there and do some thwarting _ ” and “ _ don’t hand out any more divine artifacts to humans, if you please, _ ” and he’d been getting by just fine on those for six thousand years. And now they come down here  _ twice in two days _ , first to tell him that he couldn’t have the world and now to tell him that he couldn’t have Crowley?

 

_ Well _ . If they’d wanted to tell him the second, they really shouldn’t have let him get away with talking them out of the first. 

 

“No,” he said through a last incredulous giggle. 

 

“ _ What? _ ” Crowley hissed next to him at the same time as the Metatron said “ _ Excuse us? _ ” 

 

Aziraphale looked from the Metatron to Beezlebub and then, extremely fondly, to Crowley.

 

“Absolutely not, I’m afraid,” he said, not taking his eyes off Crowley. “No, I’m sorry, we won’t be doing that at all.” No one quite seemed to know what to do with that statement, and silence hung around them for several moments, the middle managers of Heaven and Hell looking bewildered while Crowley looked increasingly terrified. Aziraphale, on the other hand, had never felt more certain or less frightened in his long, long life. 

 

“Well,” the Metatron said, recovering itself. “Consequences, then.” 

 

“You’re bozth fired,” Beelzebub grumbled. “Effective  _ immediately. _ ” 

 

Crowley had finally gathered the wherewithal to gasp “what does  _ that _ mean--” when the Metatron and Beelzebub, with little ceremony, vanished. 

 

“Quite right, too,” Aziraphale muttered, then took Crowley’s other hand, disgruntled expression evaporating. “Oh, my dear. I’m sorry. Are you all right?” Crowley laughed, a distinct edge of hysteria to it. 

 

“Angel, I can genuinely tell you that I have absolutely no idea if I’m all right,” he said. “What did you just do?” Aziraphale shrugged, then drew Crowley into his arms, trying to press some of the tension from his back. 

 

“I kept you,” he said. “I probably should have stopped to ask you before they left, and I’m sorry about that, really, but please believe me when I say  _ all _ I care about is that. Keeping you.” Crowley shuddered, but when the convulsion passed he did seem softer under Aziraphale’s hands, millimeters more relaxed. 

 

“Yeah, well. That’s all right then,” he mumbled. 

 

“I do wish they’d explained themselves a bit better,” Aziraphale said, frowning again. “What do you think that means, fired?” 

 

“I need more wine to try to decipher that,” Crowley muttered darkly, tucking himself closer to Aziraphale’s chest and making a small gesture with his right hand. Then he froze. He made the gesture again, more slowly this time. 

 

“Crowley, what…” Crowley shook his head, stepping out of Aziraphale’s arms. He closed his eyes, rolling his shoulders like he was about to release his wings, but nothing changed. 

 

“Aziraphale,” he said, deadly calm. “Take off my sunglasses.” Confused now, Aziraphale obeyed. He framed Crowley’s face very gently with his hands, thumbs moving soothingly over the wrinkles formed at the corners of Crowley’s eyes where they were still squeezed shut. They opened under his touch, and the floor abruptly, unpleasantly, dropped out from under Aziraphale’s chest. 

 

“Oh dear,” he said. Crowley started to laugh again, hysteria boiling back into his throat. 

 

“A nice color, at least?” he asked, and his eyes were wide and desperate and a lovely warm brown, circled with white and punctuated with round, human black at the center. 

 

Aziraphale rolled his own shoulders, reaching for wings that didn’t ache, didn’t feel like they’d been torn away, just… weren’t there. When he thought very sternly that he should be holding his glass of wine right now, it didn’t show up in his hand. When he reached out around him for the human feelings he could normally sense, joy and woe and need and love… there was nothing but the air around him, and the sound of Crowley’s quick, sharp breaths. 

 

“Oh.” Crowley was progressing very quickly to a full blown panic attack at the sheer concept that breathing was mandatory for him now, but Aziraphale felt so far away that all he could do was hold Crowley until he got himself back under control. 

 

\--

 

Crowley lost his flat the moment his landlord had a moment to think about who exactly had been living up there this whole time. Aziraphale, luckily, had been doing his taxes meticulously for years and the bookshop was fully, legally his; however, it lacked a bedroom or a functioning bathroom, so he eventually bought the upstairs apartment as well. Crowley, embarrassingly, came to the sudden realization that he would actually have to learn how to properly drive, and he confiscated all the wine in the building the first time Aziraphale got a hangover so bad that its effects lingered for days. It took them several weeks of trial and error to figure out eating regularly, but Crowley found that he actually quite enjoyed cooking. Aziraphale would pick recipes from the small collection of cookbooks in his inventory and pass them off to Crowley, who would make them or something very like them when the ingredients were no longer easily found. 

 

The first couple of months were the hardest, but the wonderful thing about humans is that they have always been quick to adapt, and apparently that held true as well for ethereal and occult beings who at least had a lot of experience pretending to be human. There were still times when Aziraphale forgot about his new human limits when it came to food or drink or days without sleep, still times when he automatically reached for a miracle that wasn’t forthcoming and experienced the nasty feeling of missing a step in a staircase, but he was getting on all right overall. 

 

Crowley was adjusting as well, but his new habits were a source of worry to Aziraphale. He just slept so often and for such long periods of time, which Aziraphale supposed shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise given his proclivity for sleep even before he’d needed it, but something felt off about it regardless. He would go days where he ate absolutely everything in sight, regardless of what Aziraphale thought of the palatability-- pickles and chocolates, really?-- and then he would only touch a few snacks over the course of a day or more, saying he simply wasn’t hungry or was feeling ill. Crowley brushed off Aziraphale’s concern, reasoning that neither of them could be expected to have the proper human habits yet, and besides, he always recovered. But Aziraphale could tell that Crowley felt like something was off as well, something that he didn’t want to acknowledge. Pressed together one night, both still awake at three in the morning, they broached the subject nearly at the same time. 

 

“Aziraphale, there’s something--”

 

“Dear, I wondered--”

 

They both stopped, embarrassed, and Crowley rolled over in the circle of Aziraphale’s arms to face him. 

 

“Go ahead,” Aziraphale whispered. Crowley sighed. 

 

“Shit,” he said quietly. “So you know, uh, human biology?” Aziraphale made a noncommittal noise to indicate his general, theoretical knowledge without having to admit the rather large gaps in the practical sense. “Right. Well…” 

 

Ethereal and occult beings were sexless unless they really made an effort, but ones who had made a number of efforts over the years tended to develop preferences. With a minimum of human gender baggage to contend with, those preferences might or might not line up with the being’s general human presentation. When those beings were suddenly turned to humans, requiring the full set of human anatomy, the transformation took those preferences into account and then extrapolated what would be needed internally for a fully functioning human body. It had never occured to either Aziraphale or Crowley to fully think through the possible biological consequences of this process. 

 

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, voice torn between terror and wonder. “Well. I don’t know what I expected, but…”

 

“Not this?” Crowley asked wryly. “Yeah, how do you think I feel.” 

 

“How  _ do _ you feel?” Crowley’s shuddering exhale brushed Aziraphale’s nose, and Aziraphale took the cue to close the tiny distance between them to set his lips to Crowley’s forehead, letting his eyes drift shut. Crowley tucked himself closer. 

 

“I really don’t know, angel,” he murmured. 

 

“Do you think it’s… well, strictly human?” 

 

“I feel like it must be. Nothing like this ever happened to me before. Not to offend any lingering angelic sensibilities you might have, but I  _ have _ been seducing and wiling since before the dawn of reliable birth control.” Aziraphale’s eyes were still closed, but he could perfectly picture the sly smirk that was surely forming around those words, and he tugged lightly on a lock of Crowley’s hair in retribution. Even so, he was relieved that Crowley was apparently feeling safe enough about the situation to joke. 

 

“Yes, dear, I’m sure you have,” he said with a touch too much indulgence to avoid condescension. Crowley huffed and turned over again, wiggling backward until they were back-to-chest. 

 

“Laugh it up, angel, but if I have to birth this thing the old-fashioned way then  _ all _ of the diaper duty is on you. Non-negotiable.” 

 

“Oh, dear.” Aziraphale went very still behind Crowley, suddenly stricken with the sheer reality of the situation. “Oh, we are so very unqualified for this.” 

 

“Everyone is at first, aren’t they?” When there was no immediate answer, Crowley sat up, turning on the bedside lamp as he went. “Aziraphale. Tell me you’re here for this.” 

 

The faint tremor to his voice brought Aziraphale back to himself and he sat up as well, taking both of Crowley’s hands in his own and meeting his eyes, still an odd experience even with three months to get used to it. 

 

“I’m here for everything,” he promised. 

 

Sleep was out of the question for the rest of the night, but there were plenty of things a pair of man-shaped human beings could do in a bed to make up for that. 


	2. we were safe inside

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the sex mentioned in the tags is semi-graphic; the childbirth is not at all.

There were truly an improbable amount of pillows on the hotel bed. Crowley had a split second to think about how anyone would even be able to sleep in the mountains of cotton, much less ever escape them again, before Aziraphale was pulling off his pants and pushing his thighs apart. Then all he could think about was how glad he was that the pillows were there to hold him up, and then he wasn’t thinking at all. 

 

Aziraphale’s fingers grazed gently over the folds of his labia through the thin material of his boxers, followed by the whisper of breath, and Crowley twisted and panted under the attention. After a moment of struggle, the boxers were gone too, replaced with tongue and fingers. Crowley reached around his belly to anchor one hand in Aziraphale’s curls. He didn’t pull or guide, just placed his hand there, a point of connection where the rest of him was soaring. 

 

“So when I said, let’s go out on a bang because we don’t know when we’ll be able to do this again after,” he said breathlessly as it ended. Aziraphale was smirking as he sat up, tucking himself in next to Crowley. 

 

“I said yes, and I meant it,” he said primly, taking Crowley’s hand and pushing it under the sheets. Crowley grasped where he was guided, shifting to his side for a better angle. He liked getting to do this after he’d already come first; it allowed him to tease in a way he was never able to manage when Aziraphale was reciprocating. 

 

Also, with no reason not to anymore, Aziraphale swore like anything these days. There was just something about the word “fuck” between a former angel’s plush lips, especially when it was being repeated rapid-fire into the flesh over Crowley’s heart, interspersed with his name. 

 

“You know what I miss?” Crowley asked as they sat stickily together, waiting to have the motor control to strip off the ruined topsheet. 

 

“Hmm?” 

 

“Oh lord, clean these sheets,” he hissed, and Aziraphale snorted. 

 

“All right, hint taken, you old serpent.” While Crowley sat smugly against the pillows, Aziraphale kicked off the comforter and wrenched the topsheet away, brushing it over both of them cursorily before tossing it to the corner of the room in a wadded ball. He tugged the comforter back over them both as they lay facing each other, Crowley’s middle a planet between them. Aziraphale absently followed a stretch mark with the tip of his finger. If he had still been an angel, he would have been able to feel the new life beneath if he tried, sense exactly how ready it was to come out, maybe hear a whisper of its dreams. As it was, all he felt was the warmth of Crowley’s skin and the pulse faintly drumming in his own fingers. 

 

“Did you ever think about how little changing water to wine or opening a lock seems next to what they can do all on their own?” Aziraphale asked. “Sometimes I think we were put on this planet just to give us something to do. We really never could have changed a thing, could we?” 

 

“ _ We _ could have. We  _ did _ . Some other pair?” Crowley grinned, sharp and tempting in the lamplight. “Not a chance.” 

 

“And a he-- well,  _ something _ of a severance package for our troubles, anyway.” 

 

“It worked out all right. Retirement looks good on us,” Crowley sighed contentedly, clearly done with the deeper threads of the conversation. “Whoo-ee, I can’t wait to drink again.” 

 

“It can’t be long now,” Aziraphale mused, flattening his hand near Crowley’s hip to feel the faint thrum of movement beneath the skin. 

 

“Nah,” Crowley said. “Within the week, I think. ‘M going to sleep. Let’s do room service tomorrow.” 

 

“Of course. But we  _ are _ going home after,” Aziraphale said, extracting himself from the pillows so that he could get to his suitcase of books. Crowley waved a careless hand, eyes already closed. 

 

“Stop worrying. We’ll be back before the main event. I should know.” 

 

“I will remind you again that just because you are growing the child does not actually mean that it will tell you when it’s ready to be born,” Aziraphale said sternly from across the room, where he was setting the electric kettle and preparing to settle down with a first edition of  _ Wuthering Heights _ . The only answer was a muffled, vaguely contrarian noise from the direction of the bed. Aziraphale tucked his legs beneath him on the armchair and shook his head. 

 

Aziraphale didn’t realize that he’d fallen asleep with the book on his lap and his tea cold and half-drunk on the side table until he woke up to the sound of persistent, sibilant swearing. 

 

“Shitshitshit sssssshit,” Crowley was hissing, a habit he’d never really lost when he was stressed. “Oh, boy. Okay. Sssshit.” 

 

“Crowley?” 

 

Crowley looked up, his eyes wide enough to catch the lamplight still shining from Aziraphale’s side of the room. 

 

“Remember how I said I should know?” he said, slightly desperately. “I wasn’t wrong, exactly, so don’t start, but I thought I would have a bit more lead time than…” He gestured downward. 

 

“Fuck,” Aziraphale said, with a significantly different cadence than the last time he’d said so. He placed his book carefully on the side table and crossed the room to the bed, taking in the spreading wet beneath Crowley. “Oh, my very dear idiot boy. All right. There has to be a hospital somewhere nearby, we’ll get the hotel to call a cab…” 

 

“I told you before, we are not going to a hospital!” Crowley snapped, making as if to swat Aziraphale’s hand away before changing his mind mid-motion and gripping it instead. “For all I know Hastur will be there with a bunch of bloody nuns or, I don’t know, management trainers--”

 

“You mean you were  _ serious _ about that?” Aziraphale said in horror. 

 

“Of course I was serious, you really think I’m going to have a  _ baby _ ,  _ this baby _ , in a  _ hospital? _ No, come on, we can handle this--” 

 

“We most certainly cannot handle this!” 

 

“It’s no end of the world, after all--”

 

“You can’t keep using that as proof of our competence forever when  _ that was what got us fired in the first place _ \--” 

 

“I can and I will, now shut up and find a scissors or something--” 

 

“ _A_ _SCISSORS_?” 

 

“LISTEN!” Crowley yanked viciously on the hand he was still holding, pulling Aziraphale down so that they were nose to nose. “I’m not going anywhere and I know for a fact that you can’t make me when I’m the size of a whale, so stop acting like you’re going to win this argument, get one of the pregnancy books that I know you brought with you, and help me get to the  _ devil-blessed bathtub  _ before I-- I--” His expression (which he had last worn in a flaming car on a bridge that praised the dark forces of Satan just by its very existence, not that Aziraphale would know that) collapsed in on itself as he evidently failed to come up with a sufficient threat. 

 

Luckily, Aziraphale didn’t need one. He took a deep breath, straightened up, nodded once to himself, and wrapped an arm behind Crowley’s shoulders. 

 

“Right. Let’s go, then,” he said, charitably pretending not to hear Crowley’s near-sob of relief as they shuffled off the bed together. 

 

Aziraphale had in fact brought not one but three books on pregnancy and childbirth, which he propped open on the bathroom counter while the tub filled. He piled towels at the bottom and guided Crowley in to sit on them, perching himself on the wide tiled shelf beneath the frosted window so that his legs framed Crowley’s shoulders. 

 

“People do this all the time,” he reassured himself, rubbing Crowley’s shoulders and neck, trailing fingers along his jaw and pressing them gently to his temples. “In far less hospitable circumstances. This won’t be any trouble at all. Over before we know it, I’m sure.” 

 

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said brittly. “Shut up.” 

 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said helplessly, and held Crowley’s hands, and waited. 

 

He wasn’t entirely wrong, although things might have progressed very differently without quite a large dose of luck and just possibly, the enigmatic smile of a chess player arranging Their pieces just so on a board of Their own devising directed to the right corner of the world at the right time. Whatever it was, on the morning of October 21st, 1991, at precisely 9:13 A.M., the board had a new chess piece. He was reddish-brown and wrinkly and very loud. He was also a Libra. 

 

“Still looks half-baked to me,” Crowley said, touching one finger very gently to the tip of the infant’s nose. Very quietly, to the baby, he said, “how’s that for a first day of the rest of your life, huh?” 

 

“Splendid, my dear,” Aziraphale murmured, bent over Crowley’s head to brush the baby’s curls with his thumb. The light from the window pooled around the three of them, yellow and red with the morning, and the Earth’s newest member for at least another second or two wailed into it, high, wordless, and young. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're worried about any of the practicalities of this story, trust that I was too, and I find it best to just blame ineffability and not think about it too hard. Much like pointing a flaming sword at an apocalypse, don't try any of this at home. 
> 
> deep and genuine thank yous to everyone who read this and told me they loved it.
> 
> illustrations can be found at my dreamwidth here:https://mercuryhatter.dreamwidth.org/tag/the+earth+welcomes+you


	3. epilogue: eggs and how they hatch

February 1996

 

“So,” Aziraphale said, settling himself on the park bench as Marie Enheduanna Crowley, a round, curly-headed four year old in a puffy neon eyesore of a snowsuit, took off full speed for the slide. Crowley peered sideways at Aziraphale from above his pile of scarves, able to tell from his tone that he should proceed with caution but unsure yet exactly what he was in trouble for.

 

“So?” he prompted.

 

“I was speaking with our daughter,” Aziraphale continued, tone still mildly dangerous, “and she tells me that she’s picked a new name.”

 

Crowley saw where this was going and retreated several inches into his scarves.

 

“Oh?” he asked, unconvincingly innocent.

 

“She says,” Aziraphale said on a measured breath, “that she would like to be called Worm.”

 

“That’s sweet,” Crowley offered. Aziraphale glared at him. “All right, fine. I was just showing her a worm in the greenhouse the other day and telling her how good they are for gardens, and she says, just like me, I’m good for gardens, so I say yeah, and then she says, I’m worm! And runs off, so.” He shrugged helplessly. “So, she’s Worm.”

 

“I see.”

 

“Well, I wasn’t going to tell her that she’s _not_ as good for gardens as a worm, was I?”

 

“Yes, dear, there was definitely no other possible way to change the conclusion of that conversation,” Aziraphale sighed, but he reached over to take Crowley’s hand and slip their joined hands into his coat pocket. Crowley smiled behind his scarves and leaned very slightly into the contact.

 

“But really,” Aziraphale said after a moment or two of blissful silence, “she can’t go around calling herself Worm indefinitely. She’s starting school this fall, after all.”

 

Crowley grumbled loudly at that and burrowed himself into Aziraphale’s shoulder as if he could avoid this conversation if he could just manage to disappear into his coat. Lacking the power to physically do so anymore, he eventually gave up and spoke, muffled, into Aziraphale’s shoulder.

 

“I don’t want her to go,” he mumbled.

 

“What was that, dear?” Crowley sighed and lifted his head.

 

“What kinds of things are they going to tell her at school, angel? That the dinosaurs were real? That history started with the Romans? That…” He fumbled for his next sentence, turning faintly red. “That’s she’s not… well, look, we just aren’t the most normal family in the world, and she’s not the most normal kid in the world even if her human bona fides are arguably at least stronger than ours, and you know what _the world_ is like, and we’re just going to put her in it? Just like that?”

 

“Do you mean the world that we dropped everything-- that you _made_ me drop everything-- to save?” Aziraphale’s tone was light and teasing but his face was terribly gentle. “The world that we gave up eternity to live in?”

 

“As I recall, that was your decision,” Crowley pointed out, then sighed in the face of Aziraphale’s slightly hurt frown. “No, you’re right. I know. It’s just…” He gestured vaguely with his free hand.

 

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed. “But it’s going to be all right. We’ll make sure of it.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Aziraphale got the distinct privilege of watching Crowley’s glum face blossom instantly into laughter as a snowball exploded on his shoe and allowed him to extract his hand from Aziraphale’s pocket to go after the tiny perpetrator. In retrospect, he should have known better than to take his eyes off of them, because he was fairly certain that Marie had inherited her father’s uncanny sense of exactly when Aziraphale was primed to be most annoyed. The moment he took the crossword from his pocket and settled in, his collar filled with snow and he was forced to take divine retribution.

 

Later he would take a cold hand in each of his and they would walk home, where he would make hot cocoa and hold up a girl who staunchly refused to answer to the name Marie so that she could drop marshmallows in each mug. He and Crowley shared a bottle of wine after she was put to bed. They discussed love and fear and dinosaurs and while they fell asleep twined together, they woke up with a warm, small weight between them. She, at least, was as yet fearless, and the rest of them were just going to have to take her hands and follow as she slouched relentlessly into the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's highly likely that I'm going to continue writing in this universe, because the more I think about their new lives the more parts of it I want to write. however, if I do I'm going to post those separately and link them to this fic as a series. 
> 
> Marie for Marie Curie, Enheduanna for the Sumerian poet. Worm for worm.

**Author's Note:**

> the comments are moderated for a reason and that reason is that trans men get pregnant and I don't want to hear one word about it thanks!


End file.
